Policy, Pedagogy, and Precision: Advancing a Research Agenda

Dr. T. Kody Frey

Associate Professor | University of Kentucky | School of Information Science

About Me

  • Born in Gastonia, NC
  • Attended Clemson (BA), Illinois State (MA), and Kentucky (PhD)
  • Avid Reader (Science Fiction, LitRPG, Memoirs)
  • Super Liverpool FC supporter
  • Amateur Chef (@Frey_cooks)
  • Owe my marriage, career, and family to the foundational course!

Talk Outline

Core Beliefs

My research is grounded in two core beliefs:

  1. Learning environments are unique, contextual spaces worthy of scholarly exploration and theorization
  2. Humans naturally seek to adapt their behavior in ways that optimize conditions for understanding, yet many people lack the skills and knowledge necessary to strategically do so

The intersection of these core beliefs describes a program of research that advances theoretical understanding of instructional spaces while helping learners and instructors develop communication skills

Theoretical Foundation

What is Adjustment?

Adjustment is the key to positive classroom experiences

What is Adjustment?

Adjustment is calibration

It conveys a deliberate, strategic, communicative act — how someone fine-tunes behavior, messages, or methods to improve understanding or outcomes

Research Goals

Overview

How do we adjust our classroom policies and the way we enforce them to benefit all students?

How can we adjust our pedagogy to help students develop new skills?

How do we adjust our methods to better answer the questions we are interested in?

Goal 1a: Adjusting our (p)olicies

Overview

  • Examines how instructors balance authority and rapport in their framing and enforcement of messages that control or restrict learners’ behavior

  • Concerned with individualized, micro-level issues like compliance-gaining or behavioral modification, as opposed to society-wide efforts to control or restrict how information is communicated and disseminated

Instructional (p)olicies

  • When instructors do not adjust appropriately, they are generally seen as less competent and credible (Frey & Lane, 2021a; 2021b)
  • In some situations, instructors can maintain default patterns of communication without adjusting as long as they preemptively address why (Guo et al., 2025)
  • When policies restrict behavior in areas that are socially important to students, they often react negatively (Tatum et al., 2018)

Instructional (p)olicies

  • Syllabus policies that acknowledge students’ autonomy can shape behavioral intentions (Frey et al., 2021)
  • Instructors often relax policies in the interest of motivating their students (Vallade et al., 2020; 2022)

Goal 1b: Adjusting our enforcement

Overview

  • Policies alone are not sufficient; it is a combination of policy and enforcement of it that influences classroom endeavors
  • Strictness refers to “the perceived inflexibility of an instructor based on their unwavering adherence to instructional policies and procedures” (Tatum & Frey, 2021, p. 2)

Policy Enforcement

  • Strictness occurs in a variety of domains: grading, syllabus policies, and interactions with instructors (Frey & Tatum, 2022)
  • Perceived strictness is negatively associated with caring, cognitive flexibility, and responsiveness (Frey & Tatum, 2022; Frey, 2023)
  • Perceived strictness is positively associated with assertiveness (Frey, 2023)
  • Strictness is value-neutral; students report positive and negative outcomes from strict teaching (Frey & Tatum, 2024)

What does this tell us?

  1. Policy framing and policy enforcement are conditional.
  2. Adaptation and flexibility are key components of competence in instructional settings
  3. Micro-level enforcement strategies have macro-level outcomes

Goal 2: Adjusting our pedagogy

Overview

  • How can we help better prepare students and instructors for communicating in ways that help others solve their problems?
  • Essentially, my research complements students’ increasing technical knowledge and skills with pedagogy that trains them to communicate those abilities effectively (Frey, 2024).

Building Technical Skills

  • Students may be a valuable resource for others struggling to incorporate technologies into their classrooms or workplaces (Frey, 2021; Frey et al., 2021).
  • We can find unique opportunities to help students translate their technical knowledge, including reverse mentoring and community involvement (Frey, 2024).

Building Communication Skills

  • Virtual reality could be a viable tool to help students’ practice speeches (Frisby et al., 2020).
  • In courses focusing on both writing and speaking, students grow in their capabilities (Frey & Vallade, 2018).
  • The winter break has a tangible, negative impact on students’ perceived skills (Frey & Vallade, 2023).

What does this tell us?

  1. Communication is a translational skill.
  2. We should see students as co-creators of knowledge.
  3. Skill growth and course development is an ongoing process.

Goal 3: Adjusting our methods

Overview

  • How can we advocate and teach others how to use empirical techniques that answer nuanced research questions and enhance analytic precision?
  • How do we make methods more accessible?

Hierarchical Linear Modeling

  • HLM accounts for the confounding influence of the data structure.
  • Frey and Lane (2021) control for a structure of students nested within instructors.
  • Frey and Vallade (2023) control for a structure of repeated observations nested within students.

Advancing Other Techniques

  • How can our research better assess learning as a form of change (Lane et al., 2022)?
  • Asynchronous, online focus groups (AOFGs) allow researchers to effectively access hard to reach populations (Frey & Bloch, 2023).
  • How have scholars in instructional communication approached scale development over the past decade?

What does this tell us?

  1. There are better ways to respect the structure of classroom data.
  2. We must advance multilevel thinking.
  3. Democratizing access to methods will empower others to ask deeper questions.

Collective Agenda

Next Steps

Goal 1: Adjusting (p)olicies and enforcement

Future research on policy enforcement extends in 4 directions:

  • Can we demonstrate how policies and enforcement strategies have within-student effects?
  • Want to theoretically model the way strictness motivates some students to achieve greater success and mitigates motivation for others (Frey & Tatum, 2024).
  • Students are increasingly dependent on relationships with their parents (Frey & Tatum, 2016).
  • Does perceived instructor caring moderate the impact of strict instruction on relevant outcomes, as shown to be the case for children with authoritative parents?
  • Strictness is culturally dependent.
  • Is the strictness measure stable across different institutions and cultural groups?
  • How does strictness influence outcomes for students who lack cognitive control or self-regulation?
  • Strictness may be a form of caring for some; it may provide the structure that some students need to meet their academic goals.

Goal 2: Skill Development

Future research concerning skill development extends in several directions:

  • How do pre-clinical researchers learn about, enact, and assess the translation of their basic research into applied practice?
  • Goal is to build a working definition of translational efficacy that can aid pre-clinical researchers’ communication skills in relation to their translational work
  • How can we better prepare instructors to conduct their classes digitally?
  • How can we better prepare students to use the digital tools available to them?
  • Can we continue to expand the role of motivational processes in skill development?
    • Public Speaking Self Efficacy Scale
    • Sources of Public Speaking Self-Efficacy
  • Can we turn our ongoing course assessment into valuable insights about our course?
  • What is and is not working in enhancing students’ course experiences?

Goal 3: Accessible Methods

Future research concerning methods extends in several directions:

  • HLM is not widely used in instructional communication or communication pedagogy scholarship
  • Currently writing a methodological tutorial for using HLM to model contextual effects in communication assessment
    • Two studies practically demonstrate how to evaluate longitudinal and cross-sectional data using HLM
  • In teaching a course on scale development, we noticed a lack of guidance on how to turn qualitative data into an effective set of scale items
  • We are exploring the viable of a piece that can provide best practices
  • Instructional communication is rich in reliable and valid measures
  • We can extend this knowledge by comparing the stability of measures across time and groups.
    • Do groups from a Hispanic serving institution respond to items about strictness the same way as students from Kentucky?
    • Is the instructor-student rapport interpreted similarly over the course of a semester?
  • Providing codes and syntax for these processes is key in helping others replicate them
  • Many people (myself included) learn how to conduct these processes through existing code
  • Does access to these techniques embolden scholars to ask new and exciting questions?

Thank You!

T. Kody Frey, Ph.D.

Gifford Blyton Professor in Oral Communication and Forensics
Associate Professor
School of Information Science
College of Communication and Information
University of Kentucky

317 Little Library, 160 Patterson Drive, Lexington, KY 40506-0224

| @TKFrey | tkodyfrey.github.io